The Moon: Disaster at Tyuratum

BEFORE the downfall of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviets boasted that the
first American to land on the moon would find a Russian there to
welcome him. As the third and fourth American astronauts walked on the
lunar surface, no Russian had yet ventured more than a few hundred
miles into space. The prospects for an imminent Soviet manned lunar
mission dimmed even further last week when it was revealed that the
Russian space program had recently been struck by a major disaster.

U.S. space scientists had long expected the launch of a new Russian
super rocket, a vehicle with a thrust of...